


A Warm Welcome Home

by Scruggzi



Category: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries
Genre: Domestic Fluff, Established Phrack, F/M, Fluff and Smut, Reunions, but the tone was wrong so I took it out, snuggling and introspection, this was supposed to be part of another fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-16
Updated: 2018-08-16
Packaged: 2019-06-28 06:49:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15702030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scruggzi/pseuds/Scruggzi
Summary: Phryne has recently returned from a case in Sydney, she and Jack spend an enjoyable evening welcoming each other home.





	A Warm Welcome Home

The light in the bedroom was soft and golden; the evening sun through the netting of the curtains cast a lattice of lacy shadows across the walls. A light breeze wafted through the open window bringing with it the faint scents of eucalyptus and the sea. Jack closed the door behind him and toed of his shoes and socks, tidying them neatly away, as was his habit. He had stayed at his bungalow for most of the time she had been away, and the place had felt empty and wrong. It had made him realise how long it had been since he had last stayed there for more than the odd night or two. It no longer felt like home to him, if indeed it ever had.

Phryne emerged from behind her dressing screen wearing a light robe of damasked purple silk and proceeded to her dressing table to remove her make up. He came to stand behind her, meeting her gaze in the vanity mirror and began to trail kisses slowly along the back of her neck, his hands resting on the thin silk at her waist. She hummed her approval, tilting her head back to capture his mouth as his fingers spread across her belly. Phryne turned on her stool and spread her hands up under his suit jacket, rising to push it from his shoulders and letting it fall as she began to unbutton his waistcoat.

This was her privilege, and one she had learned not to take for granted; being the one, the only one, to see him like this. Unbuttoned and unguarded, his many layers of caution and propriety stripped away until he lay gasping and naked in her arms, begging for her touch, her mouth, the wet slip of her cunt across his burning skin. It was an intoxicating power, but it came at a price. To be handed something precious and vulnerable meant a level of trust, a decision every day not to shatter the glass. Jack’s needs insinuated themselves into her conscious and subconscious until they all but overwhelmed her with the visceral desire to see him undone, conquered, satisfied. The cheerful dominance she had routinely brought to her previous sexual encounters paled to ephemera next to this. Phryne had avoided serious attachments and their associated dangers and complexities for so long in favour of delightful, but superficial pleasures. Having finally succumbed, she was utterly addicted.

That he might, at times, desire his own submission came as a greater surprise to Jack than to Phryne, who thought she had glimpsed the signs occasionally in brief, shared moments throughout their friendship, when want and fear flickered in his eyes as he looked at her. His previous sexual history had been, not lacking exactly, he had, after all, been married for well over a decade, and not always unhappily. It was, however, desire limited by respectability. He was, in many ways, a product of that vicious, hypocritical austerity of the Victorian age, which equated sexual pleasure with depravity, whilst allowing true ugliness to bubble up out of that repression, left unacknowledged in dark corners of the so-called civilised world. Jack, gentle soul that he was, had not indulged, and in fact barely acknowledged, his deeper fantasies during his marriage; he kept his carnal secrets locked away in a Pandora’s box of his own making and never turned the key.

Phryne Fisher had never met a ‘keep out’ sign she didn’t like.

That was the cause of their first argument. Having subdued enough of his natural defences to know that it thrilled him when she pushed his boundaries, she kept on doing it. Crossing further and further over the lines of acceptable behaviour in increasingly public places. She wanted to see if he would snap. He had turned her out of his office. Not the result she had been hoping for. It had actually taken an apology, something she rarely did and did not want to get into the habit of, along with a semi-genuine promise of reasonably good behaviour, before he let her back in.

“I am sorry Jack. I never meant for it to go so far.”

“You meant for it to go a lot further Phryne and that is the problem. I don’t intend to lose my job for the sake of a…liaison on my desk.” His tone was incredulous, but in fact he understood that temptation far more fully than he was willing to admit. Nevertheless, a man has his pride. He knew what she was after, and it would happen on his terms or not at all.

“I confess I have a hard time understanding what the appeal is for you either. It’s hardly the most romantic of locations.”

She shrugged, tilting her head slightly to one side as she answered.

“It’s not the location, so much as who you are when you’re here.”

His voice when he answered was low, his mouth drawn down, his eyes dark and dangerous.

“And who is that?” He asked softly.

“The man in charge.” She looked up at him through her lashes, her expression one of purpose and challenge.

He bought a desk.

The first time he bent her roughly over it, his large hands ripped through the costly silk of her lingerie leaving bruises on her skin. As they were consumed together by a white-hot fire, he whispered in her ear that she was nothing but trouble. It felt like victory.

Not that their intimacies were always so serious. The day Jack discovered that Phryne was ticklish, definitely rated as a high point their relationship – at least as far as he was concerned. Especially when he realised that threatening the back of her knee with a strategically placed finger, was second only to spiders, when it came to getting her off his desk whilst he was trying to work.  

There was no possession in his touch tonight, and much as her skin had been humming for him for hours - days really - truthfully, she was too tired to claim him. Fine detective that he was, Jack understood without instruction. Still in his trousers and singlet, braces trailing loose around his hips, he picked her up and placed her on the bed. She lay against soft pillows, resplendent as a queen, and let him worship her with soft caresses from lips and hands; an acolyte before a goddess.

“And how was Melbourne in my absence Jack?” She smiled up at him as he loosened the cord of her robe and laid her bare. She sat up momentarily to shrug it from her shoulders and fling it unceremoniously over the edge of the bed.

“Peaceful.” He kissed his way along her clavicle, smoothing a hand up along her ribcage to cup her breast in his large palm, teasing her nipple between his fingers as she sank back into the pillows with a murmur of approval.

“Since you’ve been gone,” he dipped his tongue into the hollow of her throat, drawing a gasp, “not a single piece of evidence has gone missing,” a soft kiss placed over her pulsing jugular, “from any of my crime scenes.”

She twisted her lips in amusement, leaning her head back to give him more room.

“As far as you know. I did tell Dot to hold down the fort in my absence.”

She could practically hear him rolling his eyes as he nibbled at the tender flesh beneath her ear, making her breath catch.

“Well without your influence Mrs. Collins appears to have developed an inexcusable respect for the law.”

“Sounds dreadfully dull, you must have missed me terribly.”

“I don’t know,” he moved his mouth down to her breasts, flicking his tongue across her nipple as she raked her fingers through his hair, “there’s something to be said for a quiet life.”

His fingers, which had been teasing agonising circles along the inside of her thighs, finally found their target and she moaned his name as he slid into her, stroking with a gentle but insistent pressure, searching for just the right spot...

_“Oh, God Jack do that again.”_

He drew back smirking, shifting further down the bed and murmured “I stand corrected,” before giving up on repartee entirely and burying his head between her thighs.

Phryne abandoned her normal inclination to have the last word. She luxuriated in the glorious feel of his tongue as he sought out the little hidden pearl she had that a lover she once had incongruously referred to as ‘the boy in the boat.’ Men could be so unreasonably reluctant to let women keep anything for themselves, even their own bodies. She smiled as warm, golden waves of pleasure expanded slowly from her core, filling her to her fingertips with bliss; there were always exceptions.     

Jack had borne their brief separation without complaint, but he had missed her, every day; her absence ever-present, like the pain of a phantom limb. Now that he had her here, wet and gorgeous and writhing under his touch, he felt fully justified in indulging himself. He thought he could die a happy man, drowning in the feel, the taste, the sounds of her arousal as her thighs shook around his ears, and her fingers alternately raked through his hair and fisted into the sheets at her side.

Phryne was lost in a fractured kaleidoscope of pure sensation without sense of time or place. Every peak of her climax rose up only to reveal new heights beyond, until she was gasping and whimpering in desperate pleasure, no longer able to form words. She crested the final wave with an inarticulate moan that could probably be heard in Sydney, and pushed Jack’s head away from her oversensitive flesh with shaking hands.

He wiped his mouth with his palm and shifted up the bed to kiss her tenderly, and smoothed the hair away from her damp face. Her eyes were still closed as she trembled through the aftermath. As she returned slowly to Earth, she blinked them open to see him gazing at her with a look of such tenderness and awe; it melted right through her, that look, no matter how many times she saw it. It was replaced almost immediately by a look of deep smugness, but she was entirely too sated to attempt retaliation just at present.

“That seemed to go down well.”

“Mmmm, yes. I knew there was a reason I kept you around, Inspector.” 

“And I assumed it was for easy access to crime scenes.”

“Well, that too.” She grinned at him, pulling him in for a kiss and tugging at his singlet, suddenly deciding that he was far too clothed for her liking, and determined to rectify the situation. She raked her nails through the soft hairs on his chest, glorying in the texture of his skin, smooth and warm over the muscles of his abdomen, milky pale where it rarely saw the sun.

Jack swiftly divested himself of his remaining garments, whilst Phryne reached across to her bedside table to take care of family planning. Wordlessly he took the Bakelite case from her and inserted the device with gentle fingers; an act of trust and intimacy unprecedented in all her many lovers. They had - beyond the occasional need for reassurance - tended to be spectacularly disinterested in the steps she took to prevent them from becoming fathers. Jack had taken a practical necessity, undertaken discreetly, behind the privacy of her dressing screen, and turned it into something sensual and shared. The beauty of it took her breath away every time.

Phryne’s hands moved lower, slipping below his waist to grasp his delightful arse. Their kisses intensified; Jack’s mouth, hot and demanding, moved down to her breasts, sucking the hard peak of a nipple between his lips as she ground herself against him.

She smiled into his mouth as he kissed her and ran her hand up his thigh, relishing in the familiar weight of his cock in her palm as she stroked along his length and was rewarded by a ragged gasp, huffed through a clenched jaw. He rolled them over, letting her straddle him as she took him inside, her chest pressed flat to his, her hand stroking the curls across his forehead as he smoothed the soft skin at the base of her spine, sharing a moment of utter joy as he filled her. She began to move slowly, luxuriating in this reunion, the thought of which had satisfied her lonely nights in Sydney, squeezing him from within for the joy of hearing him curse.

_“Fuck, Phryne, that feels amazing.”_

He sped up the pace, thrusting hard and fast from beneath her as she rode him, their breaths mingling in chaotic ecstasy as Jack pushed himself up off the bed to meet her, trailing soft bites and kisses across her neck. He placed a steadying hand on her hips as she began to break apart again, her movements becoming erratic as burning tendrils of pleasure spread out from her core to engulf her, his name dropping from her lips with every thrust. She stilled with a cry, which she buried in his shoulder and he stroked soothing fingers up her spine, holding her close as she trembled and shivered through the aftershocks.

Phryne put a hand up to cup Jack’s cheek, grinning a little dazedly, and tracing the laughter lines around his eyes which only showed when he truly smiled. His face in this moment radiated a pure happiness that few were privileged to see. He dropped soft kisses to her forehead and the tip of her nose, brushing lightly against her lips before rolling her swiftly to her back making her giggle in delight. She kissed him sweetly but with purpose, hooking her legs above his hips so he could take her deeper and he lost himself utterly in the sweet, wet heat of her, gasping and delirious as she trembled and fluttered around him and spent himself in glorious oblivion, with a shout of her name.

They lay together quietly for some time, her head pillowed on his chest, their breaths relaxing. Jack stroked a lazy hand down Phryne’s arm, his eyes still closed, his expression one of perfect contentment.  She could hear the sound of his heartbeat as it slowed towards sleep. The light was all but gone now, what was left was a soft, golden-red, like the dying embers of a fire.   

“I missed you Jack.” It was a quiet confession, rewarded by a kiss dropped lightly onto the tangle of her hair.

 “I missed you too, but I’m grateful that you went.”

She had taken the case as a favour. Rosie’s sister had been falsely accused of murder and his former wife had not known where else to turn for help. It meant a lot to him that the two had become friends, although he suspected it would cause him no end of grief if they ever decided to gang up on him.

Phryne smiled at him, before rising and heading to the wash stand to clean up and brush her hair before sleeping. His face was so serious in his gratitude that she couldn’t resist planting a swift kiss on the frown between his eyebrows as she went.

“Well you can make it up to me tomorrow.” She assured him lightly.

Tomorrow was Jane’s birthday and he had taken the day off to spend it with them.

“You still want me to come with you to the sanatorium?”

She nodded. “Strength in numbers. If we’re there, Jane can excuse herself if it gets too much. Besides,” she twitched a smile at him, “I want to evaluate your talent for flower arranging.”

“Well it can’t compete with my crochet skills, but I’ll do my best.”

They bickered happily for the remainder of the evening, enjoying the renewal of conversation without purpose - so hard to achieve over a telephone connection, especially at such a distance – and drifted into peaceful slumber at a shamefully respectable hour.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm currently working on a long fic (along with an unnamed partner in crime), which looks at Jane's reaction to her mother's worsening illness. It's set about a year after Phryne returns from London and phrack are basically married in all but name. The three of them have formed an unorthodox little family and Phryne and Jack are trying to cope with the complexities of raising a traumatised teenager. 
> 
> As you can probably imagine the tone of that fic was not really right for smut, so I cut this chapter out to post separately. Consider it a preemptive apology for the feast of angst that will appear once it's finished.


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